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"Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like "bitchin' " and "ridic," or the incessant use of "like" as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity. ... But linguists - many of whom once promoted theories consistent with that attitude - now say such thinking is outmoded. Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang ... the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established."

Recently, researchers have found a new language within Hawai'i, Hawaiian sign language. It has apparently been used since the 1800's by the deaf in Hawaii. Some linguists claim that it could be the last language to be discovered in the United States.

A dying language has been uncovered here in Hawai'i. Researchers are calling its existence ground-breaking - especially considering how close it came to being lost forever. Now a team of experts are working together to revive Hawai'i Sign Language, the indigenous language of Deaf people in Hawai'i. Researchers have identified 40 Native signers of Hawaii Sign Language. Most are in their 70s or older, which is why linguists say without this effort to restore HSL-the language would've died with this generation.

Euskara is Europe's oldest language, yet is teetering on the brink of extinction. Spoken in the autonomous communities of Navarre in northern Spain and the Basque Country across northern Spain and south-western France, Euskara is a linguistic mystery: it has no known origin or relation to any other language, an anomaly that has stumped linguistic experts for ages. The distinct language is a point of pride for Basques. An estimated 700,000 of them, or 35% of the Basque population, speak it today. Euskara has been shaped over time by the Basques' close contact with nature. The language contains varied vocabulary for landscapes, animals, the wind, the sea ‒ and about 100 ways to say 'butterfly'. The language may still be around, in part, because its early speakers were geographically secluded from the rest of the world by the Pyrenees.

What's up with Trump's language? Kathleen Hall Jamieson says that Trump has captivated mass audiences because he does not sound like other presidents who carefully rehearse and perfect their speeches. Instead, Trump says whatever is on his mind. The format of Trump's speeches aren't so rigid either: he will switch to unrelated topics and unnecessarily repeat sentences he just said. In fact, Trump famously repeats words like "very, very" or "many, many". David Beaver points out that Trump speaks like a teleprompter, a business person rather than a politician.

When Nicaraguan teachers failed to communicate with their 200 deaf students, the students worked together to create a linguistic structure of their own. Judy Kegl, a sign-language expert was contacted to try and decode their new language.

the part of this text that I was able to read, talked about the basics of sign language and how it is characterized as a language in the field of linguistics. This text explains how there are different meanings for similar signs based on hand shape, movement, location, orientation, and non-manual signs.

Before, linguists thought that language grew and evolved normally, but now, after research, they are now using the analogy that language is like a living creature, using concepts from biology like natural selection, and genetic drift to describe the evolution of language. The researchers now hope that linguists accept these observations/claims made from this new research.

This is about how language grows and changes. Every time someone learns it, it is reproduced.

Interesting interview with Steven Weinberger, linguistics professor at George Mason University, about how and when we develop accents, and how they affect our identity.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first Linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

Al-Sayyid is a village in Israel, populated by congenitally-deaf people. Over the past 75 years, the villagers have created an entirely new and unique language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL). The seeds emerged spontaneously among the first deaf residents and, three generations later, it has flowered into a complex language capable of expressing anything a spoken one can. Since its discovery by linguists in 2000, ABSL has captivated researchers driven by two fundamental questions: how did language emerge, and what can that tell us about the nature of the human mind? ABSL offers a unique opportunity to test a theory that has dominated linguistics since the 1950s. Put forth by Noam Chomsky, it claims that language is an innate and uniquely human trait, programmed into our genes. Children are born with a "language instinct" that compels them to effortlessly acquire whatever language (or languages) they are immersed in as toddlers.

By 2066, linguists are predicting that the "th" sound will vanish completely in the capital because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants - the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

Did Donald Trump use the word shithole when referring to African countries in a meeting with lawmakers on immigration policy, or did he actually say shithouse? These are the scatological depths to which our political discourse has sunk. Let's stipulate that regardless of whether Trump said shithole or shithouse, it does little to change the underlying racist sentiment of disparaging the whole continent of Africa (and Haiti and El Salvador as well, according to some accounts). But just as it's possible to trace the literary roots of shithole, we can observe how the word shithouse has been put into use over the centuries leading up to this peculiar moment in presidential history.

Think you'll enjoy these linguistic infographics! They cover a lot of territory: language families, linguistic diversity, to countries mapped by number of languages spoken, to American dialect maps, to bilingualism in the EU, to letter distribution in English...

Article talks about apologies and how CEOs whose facial expression matched their apologies had better invester recovery. Also, the vague language CEOs use in their apologies removed blame from themselves and made it seem like the mistake "just happened" rather than being their fault.

This evolution of the Spanish-English hybrid known as "Spanglish" really hit home. Especially considering how migrant workers adapted to language differences here in the early 20th century in the form of Pidgin, similar events took place in the states bordering Mexico.

Chisato Danjo, Lecturer in Japanese and Linguistics at York St John University, reports on her ethnographic case study examining a mother and her two bilingual Japanese-English children. Danjo argues that instead of seeing bilingualism as "dual monolingualism," as reflected in the practice of "One Parent, One Language" (OPOL), we adopt a broader view of language learning: translanguaging, which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed Linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world. When we see a child actively using, adapting and negotiating their repertoire, it casts doubt on the belief that it's bad for children to mix languages. What it could actually be doing is demonstrating high-level flexibility and interpersonal skills.

This story takes a look at other papers on JSTOR to outline how politicians can deploy metaphors, vocabulary, and rhetorical devices to frame the debate and sway voters and listeners. This is the first of a two part article. It describes, specifically, the similarities between political rhetoric and advertising techniques deployed by companies. In both instances, those using language are seeking to present a certain image of themselves.

Writer JRR Tolkien took bits of his favourite real-world languages and spliced them together. Listen carefully to the dialogue in the forthcoming movie of Return of the King and you might recognise some old English, a Welsh lilt here and there, and even some Finnish. "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," says Fred Hoyt, a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish.

the micro-nuances of their speech patterns, and how voters, and viewers, hear them - can also provide a fascinating window into how we perceive authority and who occupies it. Women and men tend to have different speech patterns, linguists will tell you. Women, especially young women, tend to have more versatile intonation. They place more emphasis on certain words; they are playful with language and have shorter and thinner vocal cords, which produce a higher pitch. That isn't absolute, nor is it necessarily a bad thing - unless, of course, you are a person with a higher pitch trying to present yourself with some kind of authority. A 2012 study published in PLoS ONE found that both men and women prefer male and female leaders who have lower-pitched voices, while a 2015 report in a journal called Political Psychology determined, in a sample of U.S. adults, that Americans prefer political candidates with lower voices as well. Lower voices do carry better, so that's not entirely without basis, said the linguist Deborah Tannen.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)